Combining Many-Body Perturbation and Quantum Electrodynamics

Abstract

It has been a long-sought problem to be able to combine many-body perturbation theory and quantum electrodynamics into a unified, covariant model. Such a model has recently been developed at our laboratory and is outlined in the present paper. The model has potential applications in many areas and opens up the possibility of studying the interplay between various interactions in different system. The model has so far been applied to highly ionized helium-like ions, and some numerical results are given. It is expected that the combined effect—that has never been calculated before—could have a significant effect on certain experimental data. The radiative effects are being regularized using the dimensional regularization in Coulomb gauge, and the first numerical results have been obtained.